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Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

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Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#111

Post by jakobe »

4ad wrote: post #104
jakobe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open activity monitor, and check which applications use a lot of memory. (Look at the "Real Mem" column). If your computer frequently freezes, the problem is mostly a specific application (Virtualbox comes to mind), not just Mac OS X itself. 4GB are more than enough for casual browsing.

Activity Monitor is a tool too blunt for these kind of scenarios. It pains me, Mac OS X has DTrace which makes it a breeze to find out what really happens, however, the only GUI tools built on top of DTrace are profiler for programmers, nothing for the casual user. Activity Monitor presents data that's not really useful and does so in an intrusive manner and in a confusing display. Mac OS X already comes with parts o…

If your problem is that you are running out of RAM, Activity monitor will tell you precisely what app is the culprit. Nothing "blunt" there.

If you want to know why a specific app is frozen (beachballing), you can click the "Sample Process" button in Activity monitor to perform a time profile.

Yes, if you want more details, you have to use Instruments or write your own DTrace scripts. But I doubt that even a time profile is useful to the "casual user".

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#112

Post by sirn »

mrich wrote: post #105
sirn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they still ship with unusable trackpads (that requires you to carry a mouse everywhere if you ever going to use your ThinkPad) or has that improved in recent years? It's the only pain point against ThinkPad for me.

I think the trackpads are good (I mainly use the keyboard so I prefer the smaller ones over Apple's, because the keys are reachable more easily) What is it you don't like? (I'm judging the T510, T60 was also ok)

Too small (I have fat fingers) and low sensitivity compared to the one in PowerBook (back then). This is from a company-issued laptop four or five years ago, however, I don't know if it has seen any improvements over the past years. (Especially the "too small" part.)

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#113

Post by randallsquared »

bad_user wrote: post #59
lloeki wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You could also create some wrapper scripts setting the path, or have someting inspired by virtualenv handle it, or maybe different terminal profiles. Those breakings really are edge cases. 2) Don't put them in the PATH. They're prefixed with 'g' so you can make an non-prefixed alias for your interactive shell, and use the prefixed variant in your scripts if need be. If you write portable scripts you're either usin…

3) g++? that's not in homebrew... He probably meant GCC, which does have recipes in Homebrew. Homebrew started taking off, and in my case Just Works This is the first time I ever heard anyone saying it. In general Homebrew did a good job for me, but it did break on me a couple of times. And when it did, fixing it caused me a lot of stress, because in the end it's really not much better than " ./configure && make && s…

    Homebrew started taking off, and in 
    my case Just Works
This is the first time I ever heard anyone saying it.

Here's another: it worked for me perfectly, in and of itself. I use pianobar, which frequently updates (due to Pandora changing protocol or keys), and I often have to do some recipe editing to get that latest update, but it seemed simple enough. Since the brew update list doesn't get fixes anything like as fast as the pianobar author updates when something breaks, it seems to me that having to wait for someone to actually compile pianobar elsewhere would mean that I'd have to wait days for the packaged version.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#114

Post by Terretta »

jyrki wrote: post #51
lloeki wrote: post #23

Inactive memory is not an OS X specific, and it's actually implemented in a number of other OSes, including FreeBSD. > when it's on disk, it definitely is not made active quickly. If an application is unloaded then many operations need to be taken to initialize stuff, reading the disk for various stuff, processing some data, allocating memory (which will be zeored out, then initialized with whatever struct and data t…

(I'm the author of the original post) You bring up good points and my article would need some clarification on some parts, I agree on that. I'll just write quick replies back to you, and try to format something on the article itself later. Purge really did free memory and quite a lot. I'm not too expert (as you probably can tell) how the OS X memory management works, but I mostly settled with solutions that seemed to…

I do happen to have an 8 GB machine, and almost never reboot (only reboot for OS updates).

I run half a menu-bar full of resident helper apps, like Dropbox (a big one), Fantastical, ScanSnap, Xmarks (another big one), Transmit (another big one), Evernote, and more. I also keep Apple Mail running, mapped to a half dozen Gmail IMAP accounts. I have "geek tool" updating my desktop with iCal appointments and various ps outputs.

I'm running a local MAMP stack and local Django stack. I run a Parallels Windows 7 VM for testing things in IE and testing from Windows in general.

Other running software is usually Safari, Terminal, Sublime Text 2, Codebox, Source Tree, Sequel Pro, Adium. I run and quit Office 2011 every time I need to edit a document. I run and quit Aperture and Photoshop.

Using this command line to see memory used by processes:

    ps -x -o rss,command | awk '{sum+=$1} END {printf "%9.3f %s\n", sum/1024, "MB" }'
Gives 3000.535 MB for all of the above, 3235.000 MB after adding Word and Excel, or 3794.277 MB after adding Photoshop CS5 and iTunes streaming radio.

Makes me wonder what you're doing to run out of memory.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#116

Post by ruediger »

I prefer Linux over OS X as well. The OSX userland is a strange mixture of GNU and BSD tools in sometimes ancient versions. OSX has a UNIX certification but there are some bugs in their POSIX API or even missing functions like clock_gettime. Linux seems more POSIX compliant.

The OSX package managers suck. I tried fink, macports, and homebrew. A lot of packages are simply broken especially now after Apple switched to clang. You end up in all kinds of weird situations. A friend of mine recently wanted to install Octave and gnuplot with homebrew and it took him several days until he gave up.

It's hard to get help with problems in OSX. This might have been improved. But back when I started using OSX in 2005/6 it was really bad. It was rare to find people with a good knowledge of the deeper layers of OSX. It was a complete different culture than Linux or even Windows. Maybe that has improved now that OSX is much more popular.

And it feels like Apple is more and more ignoring the UNIX folks.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#117

Post by jakobe »

mrich wrote: post #105
sirn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they still ship with unusable trackpads (that requires you to carry a mouse everywhere if you ever going to use your ThinkPad) or has that improved in recent years? It's the only pain point against ThinkPad for me.

I think the trackpads are good (I mainly use the keyboard so I prefer the smaller ones over Apple's, because the keys are reachable more easily) What is it you don't like? (I'm judging the T510, T60 was also ok)

It's hard to describe why Apple's trackpads are better, they simply are. If you are used to them, every other one simply feels clumsy. It must be a combination of the surface (friction), the sensor (precision) and the software drivers that makes them special. I think it was when they introduced the unibody Macbooks that the trackpads became so good. The old plastic Macbook trackpads where vastly inferior in comparison.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#118

Post by Derbasti »

esusatyo wrote: post #31
Derbasti wrote: post #9

I have been a Mac user for the last four years. I used to really like it, everything was stable and polished and just worked really well. But in the last few months, things started falling apart. My computer would freeze every few days, syncing would destroy parts of my data, the iPhone would crash every now and then, there would be weird random glitches... I'm certainly not ready to abandon ship yet, but I can see i…

May I ask if you've upgraded to Lion a few months ago? My 4 years old Macbook was not as bad as you described, but it does become a lot less stable than when it was under Snow Leopard. Even Safari does not work properly in Lion. Snow Leopard was truly very stable, it's the best major version of OS X that I've used. I hope the minor OS X updates will fix out all of the Lion bugs.

yes, I did update to Lion.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#119

Post by jakobe »

ruediger wrote: post #116

I prefer Linux over OS X as well. The OSX userland is a strange mixture of GNU and BSD tools in sometimes ancient versions. OSX has a UNIX certification but there are some bugs in their POSIX API or even missing functions like clock_gettime. Linux seems more POSIX compliant. The OSX package managers suck. I tried fink, macports, and homebrew. A lot of packages are simply broken especially now after Apple switched to…

The problem is that you are treating Mac OS as if it was a Linux distro. If you want the Linux experience, with package managers and command line utilities and X11, then Mac OS is not a good choice.

Package managers with automatic dependency resolution are a typical feature of a Linux installation. But they go against the core principles of Mac OS X. Software on Mac OS X is distributed as self-contained packages, that can either be simply dragged to the application folder or installed by the Mac OS Installer program (or with single click if the Software is available on the Mac App Store). Typical software written for the Mac has no external dependencies.

The fact that package managers like homebrew or MacPorts exist does not mean that they are the preferred way to install software on your Mac. Compare it to wine on Linux: You can run Windows software on Linux, but it will never be the real thing. MacOS tries to be compatible to Unix, but nothing more.

Re: Back on Linux (after one year of Apple and OS X)

#120

Post by freehunter »

mrich wrote: post #89

Regarding hardware quality: "...why there's no PC manufacturers that would have the same overall quality of the hardware." In my experience, business ThinkPads beat MacBooks by a mile for working (e.g. programming). I am surprised to see so many coders use MacBooks. Thinkpads have better ergonomics, are more robust and better performance/configurable hardware (e.g. RAM).

On the authors point anyway, there ARE laptop makers who make hardware of that quality. I bought a HP Envy 14 last March, solid metal with a high quality screen, huge multi-touch touchpad, no fans on the bottom, no stickers all over the place, switchable graphics. Wonderful backlit island-style keyboard. It's the PC Macbook. I sold it last month for more than half of what I bought it for, still in perfect condition.

Not saying this is what the author thinks, but a lot of people I know complain that their PC laptops are low quality and end up switching to Mac because they refuse to buy high quality laptops. My Envy was $900 with an i5, 4GB of RAM and a Radeon 5650. Spec a Macbook at that price.

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